Sonya's Teaching Blog

We've all been there, in a classroom full of students who just can't stay on task. Then you bring out the ipads, laptops or take them to a computer lab and suddenly they are laser-focused on what they are doing. Students these days are steeped in a digital world and often often this is where they feel most comfortable. Bringing digital tools into the classroom can greatly enhance our teaching and the students' learning, but how do we know what is best to use and when? Sometimes the options can be overwhelming and learning new tools can feel daunting. Below I have listed a few tools classroom use and given my personal opinion on how and why to use them. If you have used any of them before, feel free to leave a comment and tell me what you have done with them and what you think of them! Student on iPad. Image care of apple.com Website Creation There are some great tools out there for creating websites, that are intuitive and students may choose them unprompted. As a ...

Reading Girl Code: Gaming, Going Viral and Getting It Done  was accidentally appropriate on my part, as May 11 was National  Girls Learning Code Day . This book was written by Sophie Houser and Andrea Gonzales and tells the true story of how they spent a summer learning to code with a  Girls Who Code  camp in New York City, created a game together as a final project, and experienced their game, Tampon Run , going viral and taking their lives by storm (the game was not working for me when I tried, but there is now a version for iOS included in the link). Girl Code  cover care of Goodreads . There were a lot of things I loved about this book. I love that it was a book written for teens, by teens. I loved that they speak so frankly about their experiences, including both the positive and the negative aspects of their experience. In addition to talking about coding, they discuss topics such as anxiety and impostor syndrome, trying to figure out what you want...